How freemium nearly caused our business to fail

Baremetrics posted an interesting post mortem on their attempt at having a free plan, which almost sunk their company.

The bigger issues came down to the fact that our resources are finite. We’d been able to scale our infrastructure slowly because our growth before had been predictable and we could figure out ahead of time when certain bottlenecks would become major issues.

The free plan threw all of that out the window, though.

When your available resources, whether it be team size, performance caps or money, are tight, then “free” has a real possibility of causing more damage than providing any real benefit.

The concolusion of the experiment was:

In the past week, we’ve switched to a free trial. For 14 days, you get full access to everything, after which you can pick a plan. If you chose not to pick a plan, we stop processing your data.

I highly encourage you to read the full freemium post mortem at Baremetrics blog.